Synthesis contest winners offer new algorithms

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.  Demonstrating algorithmic improvements that could potentially enhance IC implementation tools, students from the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley won a programming challenge at the International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) in Vail, Colorado Wednesday (June 7).

All entries in the IWLS 2006 Implementation Challenge were EDA tools that run natively on the OpenAccess database and use the OA Gear package developed at Cadence Berkeley Labs. Targeted towards academic researchers, OA Gear is an open-source toolkit that extends the utility of the OpenAccess database.

Michigan students Kai-Hui Chang and David Papa demonstrated a 100-fold speedup over the logic simulation engine released previously with the OA Gear package. They leveraged this simulator for fast combinational equivalence checking, and developed a metric for gauging similarity between two logic circuits for use in incremental verification.

Berkeley students Qi Zhu and Nathan Kitchen described equivalence checking algorithms that can simplify circuits during bounded model checking. Kitchen's presentation suggested several improvements to OpenAccess and OA Gear, including more flexible interfaces, new features and new modules.